Finance: banking, insurance, markets: Chokepoints and risks
Banks, insurers, markets and payment rails that lend, insure and invest money
Chokepoints and risks
- Payment-rail concentration: UPI runs through one operator, and two apps (PhonePe and Google Pay) carried 79% of its volume in May 20264,5.
- Cyber and cloud dependency: banks spend more on technology than the next four sectors combined, so a vendor or cloud outage can freeze services1.
- Fintech disruption: fintech revenues grew 22% a year in 2021 to 2025 against 5% for banks, squeezing fee income1.
- India's protection gap: insurance penetration flat at 3.7% of GDP leaves households exposed to health and disaster costs3.
- Credit and property cycles: bank loan books and insurer portfolios rest heavily on real-estate collateral.